Friday, September 21, 2012

Show Up For Your Life!


Author of Hamlet’s Blackberry, William “Bill” Powers, makes some very good points of emphasis in his web interview with Katie Couric. His book, Hamlet’s Blackberry, covers how technology is having such an enormous impact on our lives. Unfortunately, with the enormous impact comes some drawbacks. Powers offers the ideas that technology is inhibiting our deep thinking skills, skills of multitasking, focusing, finding our truer selves, and connecting with the people physically around us.
It’s true, scientific has shown that people get chemical releases of dopamine when we get responses from our technology (texts, emails, and calls).  A New York Time’s article agrees (and so do I) with Powers idea that these gratifications become addictive and “we get bored” when we do not get that sense of being connected. Powers also brings up the topic of how our brain is an associative mechanism and that the technology, or “screens,” prohibit our deep thinking because we are always busy and rarely have downtime to create our own thoughts and process the information we take in. In my research I found several news articles that support this information. This article supports his arguments that “unplugged” time, like a “walk in nature,” will actually allow a person to better store information in their memory than if their brain was cluttered with the constant information from technology sources.
Powers does offer one argument that I do not necessarily agree with: we are unable to form original thoughts due to groupthink in the digital crowd online. In my personal experiences, I find that when reading online articles I can still form my own opinions and conclusions on the topic. If a person is having a problem forming his/her own opinions on a specific topic, he/she should not read the comments page after the article. He/she could also take a moment to digest the information before clicking to the next article.
Another serious topic that William Powers covers in his book is the weakening of our personal relationships due to technology. I, along with Kord Campbell, agree with Powers because when people are online or looking through their “screens,” they do not fully perceive the people and environment around them. They are not totally in a conversation and frequently go “huh?” or “what?” when trying to get back into the conversation. Kord Campbell, not unlike William Powers, suffered from his family life distancing due to the technology in his home. Powers suggests that with a little determination families will easily regain their connectedness (which I find to be totally true).
One of my favorite parts in William Powers’s book is his integration of past philosophers and their problems with information overload. I found it captivating that philosophers such as Socrates found distancing himself from the crowd allowed him to have clearer conversations and deeper understanding of the topics discussed. Seneca, one of the readers favorite examples, provides a great comment on the “restless energy from the hunted mind,” which states our minds are being “hunted” from relentless emails, notifications, tweets, and more.  Seneca solved his problem by focusing on blocking out all distractions and turning his mind into a garden, in which he focuses solely on one task. I thoroughly enjoy Power’s statements being supported with philosophers, it supplies breadth to his points and allows for a denser argument.
William Powers is in no way criticizing personal use of technology; in fact, he is supporting it. He believes we should learn to control our urges to be connected all hours of the day. His goal is to raise awareness of the issue and I believe that will go farther than condemning all technology users. He wants us to get the most of both technology and life. I plan to “show up for my life,” do you?

The link to William Power's Interview is found here.